By Tanya E. E. E. Schmid
Clauss showed up at our farm on a Thursday evening two weeks ago looking like a drowned mouse. It had been raining so hard most of October that even our large rooster appeared recently-hatched. Jim and I were planting the last of the new apple trees in the lower field when the elfish man waved from our gravel road.
He shouted, “Let me give you a hand widdat!” and came over to help us lift a root-ball into the muddy hole we had dug. Despite his small stature and wrinkled face, Clauss was strong. I held the broom-stick-of-a-trunk as the two men bound up the rusty metal mesh meant to protect the roots from greedy mice during the upcoming winter.
“Watch your fingers! Dere we go now. Dat’ll bout do it.” Like a sports commentator he vocalized our every movement. With numb hands in drenched gloves, we covered the encapsulated roots with the dirt from the hole. Then Clauss stood up, rain dripping from his nose, wiped his muddy palms on his pants and smiled, displaying the only three teeth he had left. “What’s next?”
He was from Dresden and called himself a traveler. His German accent juxtaposed his playful gray ponytail, and his skin hung on him much like his wet clothes. Thick, round spectacles made his eyes bulge fly-like through a smudged milky haze that left me wondering if he saw the world clearly. Although mild-mannered, he talked non-stop, which fascinated my husband who is a quiet man. I found Clauss rather tiring because I had to listen carefully in order to understand him with the accent and all those missing teeth.
October had been mild and we figured Clauss had spent his recent nights in someone else’s barn. He had a hungry look in his eyes, so we asked him up for dinner, considering the rain and all. We were a bit surprised when he walked to a woodpile just a deer’s leap down the road and returned carrying a backpack loaded with a faded sleeping bag, a torn umbrella, and a dozen plastic bags with mysterious contents. “Got all my collections. Best to keep ’em dry.” Jim told him he could stay in the room in our attic for the night and I don’t think Clauss noticed the sour look I gave my husband.
The next day Clauss—“I spell it wid a ‘c’, ever since de time I worked de vineyards in western France”—helped us gather chestnuts and talked so much I thought the squirrels would fall dead from the trees. After lunch I was going to make coffee and he said, “Let me do dat.”
He returned with one of his plastic bags and emptied a mushy brown mess into the nearest metal pot. “Used coffee grounds are always good for one more cookin’. Got dese from de local diner.” He asked for some sugar and I shut my mouth and gave him the sugar bowl. He emptied half of it on top of the old coffee grounds, poured some water from the tap over them, and set the pot on the burner, turning it up to “high.”
That pot started cooking, and I handed Clauss a spoon for stirring the thick liquid, but he was too busy telling us about the indigenous peoples of Lappland with whom he had spent a whole summer herding reindeer. “Nice folk, but dey drink a bit much. When dey run outta hard liquor, dey cut both ends off a loaf of bread, pour rubbing alcohol troo de bread like a filter, and drink dat!” He swung the spoon around like a conductor’s baton until the coffee boiled over in a pile of molten lava on my stove-top.
Clauss jumped and stirred frantically, “No problem,” and poured the remaining clumpy liquid into each of our cups, then sat down to finish his tale. My spoon stood straight up in my cup, so I emptied it into the compost bin under the sink when our guest wasn’t looking.
It was even worse at dinner. He saw I was making rice and brought down a plastic bag of day-old mushrooms. Now, I know how dangerous it is if you pick the wrong mushrooms. We took a few courses last year and we often gather Morels and Angel Wings since those are the two we’re sure of. But those mushrooms from Clauss looked different, and they were a bit over-ripe. I thanked him kindly and asked if I could dry them for later, seeing as I had already picked enough vegetables from our garden for the rice dish. He seemed satisfied with that and helped Jim unload the last of the vegetable crates from the truck before the meal.
It’s not that I didn’t like the man. He had a practicality about him when he wasn’t preoccupied with his “experiments.” Most of those involved cooking things in our portable solar oven out on the porch—strange-smelling teas made of roots, seeds, buds or a few of the last green tomatoes he’d snuck from our greenhouse. He was testing out which plants were edible. “I don’t trust what most books say about poisonous plants,” he said.
He lived “from the bounties of Mother Nature” and a few local gardens along the way. I’ll admit, it was interesting when he showed me how to cook up nettles and bishop’s weed and plantain. I mean, here I am sowing cabbage and carrots and onions, and all the while there are edible greens growing wild in our fields that I didn’t even know about.
Clauss said I had to learn to look closer at things. He walked delicately through our fields, giving the grasshoppers time to flee in tiny bursts. With his feet wide-spread, he would crouch down, a hand on each knee, and search the tall grass like a chicken looking for feed. Then he’d reach out and carefully pluck a sprout of wild onion from amidst the weeds, stand up and, tipping
his head down to look over his greasy glasses, he’d examine the green sliver as a jeweler would a priceless stone. His cheeks would lift in satisfaction and he’d raise his prize high as if honoring the heavens before slowly placing it in the worn plastic bag hanging from his belt.
When he was out helping Jim, I would sneak onto the internet to read up on his latest “find” on our ten acres. Some wild things are dangerous, and it was unnerving how he constantly added them to my cooking pots when I wasn’t looking. Our cat avoided him like it would a rocking chair—and our cat likes everybody.
The next thing I knew, Clauss was salvaging things from our compost heap! “Perfectly good” apple cores and cabbage stems were recycled in his mini-brewery. He left small plastic bottles of his botanical potions standing around on our porch until they either turned green or exploded into foam. He sometimes pretended to drink them anyway, but I saw him empty one at the base of the cherry tree out back. When he caught me watching he said, “Great fertilizer!”
At mealtimes he would toss an edible Capuchin bud or red clover on top of whatever I had just served, “For a little color.” I tried to get used to him walking into my kitchen and throwing a handful of fresh corn silk or rosehips into the pot of tea I had just made with the mint leaves from our garden. I drew the line when he made us a salad out of linden tree leaves. “Don’t even need to wash’em,” he said. “De dirt gives you your minerals and de worms are good for protein.” I handed him back the bowl and told him to go fertilize the cherry tree.
Then came my upset stomach. Clauss and Jim had been cutting wood for a few days to stockpile for the winter. I didn’t see much of Jim anymore. Those two were always off talking and laughing. I had banned Clauss from the kitchen, saying that I’d rather do my own cooking, seeing as his “experiments” always left my kitchen looking like a jungle expedition gone wrong. I’d just prepared a nice lunch when Clauss walked in with two plastic bottles from his latest
assortment of decoctions. “Here, try these,” he said with a challenging smile. He handed one bottle to Jim and the other to me. He wouldn’t tell us what herbs were in the drinks except that they came from his large collection of plants and seeds obtained on his many journeys. I took only one sip from my bottle because it tasted so bitter, but Jim didn’t seem to mind his and downed all of it. Later, I got stomach cramps. Jim said he’d had a bit of gas, but nothing serious. Just one sip of mine and I had the runs for two days.
I wondered what the man was up to, so I listened more carefully. During the second week he stayed with us, hints at Clauss’ personal life surfaced like an old tree stump tossed into a lake which remains stubbornly afloat: the bombing of Dresden when he was a child, the challenges in East Germany after the wall fell, his failed marriage—all of which had led to his nomadic lifestyle. I wondered when he would move on, but Jim didn’t seem to mind the help or Clauss’ wild stories about the sunrise in Greenland or training huskies in the Yukon. Jim even gave him some of his old clothes, seeing as Clauss was “working for us now.” I worried about employment laws and all that, but Jim shrugged it off, saying, “It’s not permanent.”
Then Mr. Fiddles disappeared. Now, our cat has been known to roam for a day or two on occasion, but I had my doubts. I’d found a mound of greens, something like cooked spinach, in his dish the day before, and I explained to Clauss that cats were carnivores. “Maybe he’s been longing to be a vegetarian all along and nobody’s ever asked,” was his reply.
A day later I checked out back by the cherry tree, then asked Jim if East Germans ate cats. Jim said, “I don’t think that’s funny.” I said, “Me neither.”
Last night I made rice for dinner again, and I thought of those mushrooms Clauss had given me. I’d dried them just like we were taught and stored them in a sterile glass container and all. I knew that if you cook mushrooms long enough, most toxins are reduced. I never really
thought there was any risk. So, I cooked up a few of them in a separate pot and mixed them in with Clauss’ rice. I don’t know why I didn’t put any in Jim’s or mine. After all, Clauss was the one who’d picked them. And the wild story he told at dinner, about losing a shoe in the Grand Tetons, made us laugh so hard that I completely forgot about the mushrooms he was eating.
We found Clauss this morning in the south field, laying on his back with his hands behind his head as if he had been stargazing when he died. My lungs got all tied up with my stomach, but I stayed quiet because it was so peaceful with the sun rising to the early birdsong. He didn’t look like he’d had cramps, so maybe it wasn’t the mushrooms. I don’t know if it was some other wild thing he ate or if it was his past that killed him. Maybe just old age. Jim said he was simply off on his next adventure.
Jim wasn’t upset when we found him. He’s kind of religious like that. Whenever people in town pass away, Jim just says, “Figure God pretty much knows what he’s doing.” I don’t even know how old Clauss was. I asked Jim what he guessed. He said, “With some people age can’t be measured in years.”
The undertaker came and got him. I don’t know where they’ll want to bury Clauss, but if it’s all the same, I think under that apple tree he helped us plant, that would be nice. I found Mr. Fiddles sitting there this morning. I could take all those plastic bags full of the seeds Clauss collected and empty them under that little tree. And next fall, when the blossoms have come and gone, they’ll ride the wind to many faraway places.
Tanya E. E. E. Schmid was a Doctor of Oriental Medicine until 2014 when she started a permaculture farm. Her work has appeared in Valparaiso Fiction Review, Ponder Review, ENO, Sky Island Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, and others. Tanya was a finalist in Ruminate’s The Waking Flash Contest. www.tanyaswriting.com